Colin Parris was today's keynote at the Virtual Worlds conference. Again, my notes, my mistakes, my opinions.
Colin Parris, VP of IBM's company Digital convergence. This is a special evolution. I spearhead this activity for the IBM company. There's a stong impact this can have on business. We're approaching a real inflection point for virtual worlds. People are already talking about the 3d internet that enables new or transformed applications that enables new business processes. I am struck by how rapidly this evolution is progressing. It's really about people, collaboration and innovation. Working as a broad community. We can make them fit for business and society and realize the true potential of virtual worlds.
vws can accelerate large-scale collaborative action. Collaboration is key to innovation. Close collaboration across an ecosystem can help identify what you do and what you rely on others to do. the power of the individual means being able to connect with different people. Where do you meet, if you're a global company?
for the future: trust and identity management is a base requirement. we need to improve user experience,integrate virtual worlds with each other. this is mandatory for the widespread adoption. We need open standards. We need to aggressively drive the creation of more and new business applications.
Audience: I'm from Motorola, you mentioned standardization. I assume there's no existing standards bodies that would be the appropriate place to push virtual worlds standards, are you working to ensure a standard, did you start a standards body?
IBM: We are working on that right now. Wait a couple of months. There are things being created, there are new groups cropping up, it's key to work with everybody.
Audience: what can IBM do to help small businesses leverage these vw opportunities?
IBM - we can help you as clients or partners, I'd like to point you to the IBM booth, we have the offerings that you would need.
Audience: how can small businesses learn from large businesses? Regarding branding for example?
IBM - it works both ways, we can learn from each other. Our larger clients worry about their brand image if the worlds aren't fit for business. There are flying objects and activities that aren't appropriate for business. (IWH: this is a veiled reference to porn). Based on the world you're in, you want to see the demographics and see if it's appropriate for what you want to sell. There's no universal truth, this is still in formation.
Audience - I'm an attorney. How does IBM balance it's need to innovate in these areas, with the unfortunate lack of legal precendents? Nothing that could be applied to the world have yet been applied.
IBM - it's time for us to leverage the community on that. We've had many conversations with lawyers about what it means to have a virtual world. We'd like to collaborate with the community to figure out the answers. The old days of someone giving a definitive answer to this are way past. There are things you should not do with air guns and flying objects, but that's just the beginning. As we begin to evolve this we need to work together. I'd be glad to take your card and introduce you to our lawyers so you can work together.
Audience - what is IBM's virtual world strategy, how would you articulate it? Are you planning to roll out your own virtual world? Are you staying in Second Life?
IBM - we have clients and community. We're client driven, we're focused on business value. Our clients drive us to the worlds that we're in and the work that we do. SL has a critical mass that lends itself to it. our clients will also say, we'd like to go to a much younger demographic, so we can help them elsewhere too.
So, we also have a strong community presence. Most of the wvs are "closed", meaning, they don't talk to the web or other apps. we need to attach these to the legacy back ends of the existing systems. What is the right way to attach them to the web, to internal applications? We need to leverage the community undersanding of how these worlds work, are the next steps improvement for different types of business interfaces? So the worlds are better structured to allow millions of users to show up? We need to understand the things we need to do to build a plagtform that's actually fit for business.
Audience: what metrics are you using from the client's point of view?
IBM - I want mindshare, publicity, how many people attend my store? What are their actions, what do they look at most? They may have questionnaires, they don't necessary have strict ROI. Some have marketing needs. I want to test if a new product is useful or what should we change. It depends what the client needs.
Audience - do you have feedback then?
IBM - much of it is confidential, overal they are pelased. The new insights gained are very important, it's hard to put a number on it. The earlier you engage, understand what you need to do, and realign your company stragtegy for what you need to do, the better.
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